Simplicity
by Philososaurus
Summary: "Whether they left together or with other people, the next mission would see them back at their usual table for another night of revelry . . . They just were, and that was enough. Or so it had seemed, until the day that inevitability caught up with them at last, and seemed bent on smacking them around." Dragonborn/Farkas. One-shot.


Author's Note: I do not own Skyrim. All recognizable characters, events, and ideas belong to the legal copyright holder(s).

It had started out simple. If she was sure of nothing else anymore, Thrrek was sure of that.

She's been down in the Rift, tracking down a particularly vicious troll. Unlike every other troll that came before, this one was not to be fooled by misdirection and clever bow-work. She was forced to tangle with it up close, relying on her dubious swordsmanship to get her through.

After a grueling battle, she'd finally landed a death blow. She stood over the corpse, panting, distracted by the heat of the blood rushing through her veins. Afterward, she was never sure if it had been the close proximity that had been her undoing or some other factor. All she knew at the time was that the fight had left her spoiling for another. She felt powerful, predatory, yet strangely unfulfilled.

The sound of a very loud, very male, chuckle startled her out of her reverie. Stomach churning, she raised her eyes from the corpse to the man, leaning against his war axe and laughing.

"Good job, lass. I didn't know you had it in you," Farkas grinned. "Nothing like the heat of a good battle, is there?"

She surveyed him silently. She was barely 19, still quite a new wolf, and she frequently had trouble separating the wolf's instincts from her own. She could feel her hackles rising, and tried very hard to remind her wolf that Farkas was her friend. Not a threat, and not a piece of meat.

Farkas was 24, and had had the beast's blood in his veins for substantially longer than she had. Had he stopped to think about it, he probably could have calmed her. But he wasn't overly given to reflection or analysis, and flirting was as natural as breathing to him. So he smiled wryly and added, "Unless it's the heat of a good bedding, that is. Want to go for a quick one before we head back to Jorvaskr?"

So, in a way, it was really all his fault when she leapt at him. She couldn't be certain if she was going for the jugular or not, but luckily Farkas had equally quick reflexes, so they never found out. Instead he caught her mid-leap, though the force of impact knocked them both to the ground.

A brief tussle ensued, with much thrashing and grunting on both sides, but in the end he managed to pin her. He knelt on her legs, pressed her lower arms to the ground above her head, and growled, "What the _hell_ is your problem?" She growled back, beyond speech, and smashed her face into his.

It was possibly the worst kiss in the history of kisses. It wasn't even intentional, not really - it was more like she had decided to punch him in the mouth, with her mouth. It was painful as hell, and she cut her lip on his teeth, but it surprisingly did the trick. The bloodlust ebbed even as a different type of lust took its place.

Farkas, for his part, was understandably confused. He wrenched backward as far as his grip on her arms would allow and eyed her speculatively. Something in her face must have decided him, because he slowly, deliberately, relaxed his hold on her arms. She thought he would get up then, but it was his turn to surprise her. Instead he cupped her face with his hand and leaned forward, never taking his eyes off hers.

Many men boasted of their prowess in bed; Thrrek had been with plenty of them. Generally speaking, they were not as good as they thought they were. Occasionally, you would be surprised by one who lived up to his talk, and she was pleased to discover that Farkas was one of these rare few. She supposed it made an odd kind of sense. Farkas lived entirely in the moment, and he always put everything he had into the task at hand. This was no exception. He kissed like he meant it; he moved with a seemingly effortless, instinctual grace. It was intense and honest, and unequivocally Farkas. In that moment, it was perfect.

Afterward, her rational mind had a chance to catch up with her actions, and it got even by walloping her upside the head with its logic. Of all the stupid, idiotic, ill-conceived choices available out there, she had to pick Farkas. This was going to ruin everything, just when she was starting to feel at home for the first time in her life. He was the only Companion she actively liked, the first friend she had ever really had aside from her foster-brother. Vilkas resented her. Skjor was dead. Aella, frankly, scared her. And Kodlak had taken to looking at her all sad and wounded ever since she'd taken the beast blood. As for the others, well . . . she was beyond them, and they knew it, and they hated her for it. Farkas was the only one who really got her, the reason she'd stayed on in Jorvaskr after she'd made enough coin to feed herself. And she'd gone and screwed it all up by sleeping with him.

Maybe she could pretend it had never happened. That might work, right? Farkas's women were disposable; everyone knew that. Maybe they could just never speak of it again? It might be awkward, mind you. Sleeping with friends tended to invite awkward. But at least this little misstep didn't seem to have affected her opinion of him too terribly. She still loved him as a friend, of course. And she was attracted to him, but that was also nothing new. She searched herself for hidden signs of jealousy or gooey relationship-y feelings, and was relieved when she came up short.

She smiled in relief, and relaxed . . . and immediately tensed up again at the horrible thought that _he_ could have gooey feelings for _her_.

She found herself jerking backward at the idea, pulling away as though thoughts were contagious. This turned out to be a bad mistake, because werewolves are light sleepers at the best of times. And so, when Farkas opened his eyes, it was to find her hunched in a ball several feet away, knees drawn protectively up to her chest and eyes wide with panic.

"Er." He cleared his throat and wiped the sleep out of his eyes. "I, ah, guess it's too late for me to pretend to still be asleep, yes?"

"Yes," she managed, still eyeing him with panicked suspicion.

"Okay." He sat up and regarded her silently for a moment. He then sighed, groaned with something that sounded oddly like defeat, and flopped backward onto the ground again, covering his eyes with his hand. "All right, fine. We can get married." Her answering squawk of dismay seemed to take him aback, and he peered at her through his fingers. "Well, that's what you want, isn't it?"

"No!," she nearly shrieked. "No, I . . .," she paused, taking in his blank stare, and steeled herself. She could do this. For him. "I mean. Um. If you . . . need . . . I suppose we can talk about it." She hung her head. Despite her best efforts, panic was still gripping her. "But I just . . . you should know . . . I would be the worst wife in the history of the world! I mean, I'm the Dragonborn. You know what that means? Dragons. Stalking me, everywhere I go. And don't even get me started on that idiotic war, I'll be very, very lucky if I can get out of this without taking a side. Both the Stormcloaks and the Imperials seem to want me for some tactical advantage, and I imagine one of these days, one of them will find a way. Which means I won't be terribly safe to be around even if I do manage to get this dragon thing sorted . . . also, I can't cook. I know this may come as a surprise to you. Nordic girls are supposed to be able to cook. But you have to remember, I was raised Khajit. I didn't learn those things. We, I, we learned tactics and how to make poisons and how to shoot a bow . . . I suppose I'm not bad with toast. Toast is nice, it's very versatile, but you can't really live on toast. So, um. If you want a wife who is likely to get you killed. And can't cook. I suppose I'm not . . . completely unwilling . . . to do that."

She risked a glance upward, and was faintly startled to see him laughing silently, hard enough that tears were welling up in the corners of his eyes.

She was a bit frustrated, but found herself starting to smile in spite of herself. "Shit. You really need to stop me when I do that."

"Are you kidding? It's hilarious when you do that." They looked at each other, and both burst into peals of unrestrained laughter.

With normalcy more or less restored, he looked over at her. "Look, I just want to say. I don't want to get married, and I would probably be a terrible husband anyway. But I . . . you're my friend, you know? Maybe the closest one I've got, and I don't want to lose that."

"Me neither. This thing . . . it doesn't need to mean anything. I'm not terribly keen on the idea of relationship at all, point of fact. We're wanderers. Warriors. Being tied down . . . it's not really practical, you know."

"Thank the Nine. There's a wench down at the Bannered Mare who would be beside herself with grief."

She laughed, relief coursing through her veins. "Well, we can't have that." She hugged him. "And now, can we please talk about something else? I'm starting to get hives from all this emotional crap."

"Hmm…. well, are you sure you want to talk?" He smiled suggestively, grabbed her hips, and pulled her closer to him.

"Farkas! Didn't we just decide . . .?"

"I'm pretty sure we decided we're friends first. I don't recall anything about not having some fun."

In spite of her misgivings, she slid her arms around his neck. "You know this is a terrible idea, don't you?"

"The worst," he agreed, pulling her in for another kiss.

And it really was that simple. For all her misgivings, things with Farkas just seemed to fall into place. Their biggest problem turned out to be not jealousy or awkwardness, but their fellow Companions.

They had decided on the long, slow journey back to Jorvaskr that they should keep their new arrangement private. There were hardly any actual rules in the group, but not fraternizing with your shield-siblings was one of them. It was completely logical; they were supposed to be comrades-in-arms, watching each other's backs and keeping each other alive. It would be very hard to keep someone alive if you were busy bedding them, after all. Farkas agreed, and they solemnly promised each other that they would be cautious and discreet in their interactions.

The trouble was that Farkas was, generally speaking, about as discreet as hitting someone with a brick. Subtlety and stealth were alien concepts to him. This had been a problem even on their first mission together; they'd nearly come to blows over the issue in Dustman's Cairn. Since then, Thrrek had learned to appreciate his total honesty. Farkas did not hide what he was thinking and he did not apologize for his actions, and there was something appealing in that trait, particularly when the rest of the world seemed so bent on tricking her into doing things she didn't want to do.

Still, it did present a problem in the current situation. But it couldn't be helped, and they did the best they could. If the others didn't quite believe her increasingly wild stories of roving bandits and hostile giants that conveniently seemed to delay their returns from every mission over the next few months, they had the good grace to not overtly say so . . .

. . . At least, not until they were both badly injured by some Falmer and barely made it back home.

"I don't know, they just . . . came out of nowhere," she offered weakly. She did know, of course; they had thought they'd cleared the place out, and then were too distracted to notice the survivors had rallied. It had been their own, stupid faults, and she burned with the shame of it.

Vilkas tended to choose his words more carefully than his brother, but he was quite capable of bluntness when the situation called for it. "I ought to let you die for this. There's no honor in you; your sly trickery and sneak attacks are better suited to the Riften sewers than to Jorvaskr. You're a disgrace to the name of Nord, I vehemently dislike you, and your dubious wiles nearly got my brother killed." He tied a bandage with unnecessary force.

"But?"

"But even now, Farkas is happier than I've ever seen him. So." He glared even more fiercely at her. "So if you ever do this again, I will kill you myself." He turned then and stalked out of the room, leaving Thrrek - for once - shocked into silence.

The Circle convened shortly thereafter, and it was every bit as embarrassing as she'd feared. They were asked to give a full account of the Falmer attack. Thrrek considered lying or refusing to answer the questions, but Farkas's innate honesty made that tactic wholly impractical. And so, for the first time since she could remember, Thrrek found herself compelled to give a complete, and completely truthful, explanation of her actions and motivations.

The trouble with the truth, she reflected, was that most people didn't realize until after the fact that they would rather have not heard it. Her unprecedented honesty was met with a long, shocked silence. Kodlak looked rather as if he wished the ground would swallow him up immediately. Aella looked vaguely appalled, and Vilkas seemed torn between smugness and discomfort. She cursed herself roundly for resorting to the truth and, cheeks flaming, stared resolutely at the ground as she waited for a response.

"You will, of course, resist these . . . impulses . . . in the future?," Kodlak eventually managed to ask.

Thrrek opened her mouth to respond, but Farkas beat her to it. "No," he replied simply. She glanced over at him, and was faintly impressed to see him standing straight, as confident and unapologetic as ever. Taking heart from his demeanor, Thrrek got a stranglehold on her embarrassment. Who were these people to make her feel ashamed? She was Thrrek of Clan Rahknai, and she had never been ashamed of anything in her life. Cursing herself for a Nordic idiot, she looked defiantly upward.

It turned out to be a wasted challenge, as Kodlak seemed determined to look anywhere but at her. "Erm. Well then. If you are resolved to marry, . . ."

"We're not," she interjected quickly, and was sadistically pleased when her statement seemed to leave him more at a loss than ever. Clearly out of his comfort zone, he looked wildly to the others for support.

Aella, naturally, came to his rescue. "Then you can surely see the sense in our forbidding you from undertaking joint missions in the future."

"No." Aella opened her mouth to object, but Farkas continued, angrily. "You have no right to forbid me anything. I am a Companion, a free Nord, and I make my own choices."

"I'll clear out before I take orders from anyone. I so did not sign on for this crap," Thrrek added, and Farkas nodded his agreement.

Faced with the prospect of losing two of their best warriors, the other members of the Circle could do little else aside from beg them to curb their impulses on missions. But it was a long and uncomfortable road before the others came close to accepting their choice, let alone understanding it. For their part, Thrrek and Farkas learned a modicrum of caution from their near-death experience, and on future missions they managed - mostly - to keep their hands to themselves.

Things were more relaxed with everything out in the open, and life took on an easy rhythm. They settled into a natural non-routine. Sometimes they went on missions together, sometimes separately, but they always met at the Bannered Mare afterward for a night of drinks and debauchery, where they would laugh and joke and flirt with anything that moved. Sometimes they spent the evening entwined in a single chair, oblivious to the bustle of the room around them. Sometimes they were at opposite ends of their usual table, chatting up the other patrons. More than once they spent an evening competing for the attentions of the same barmaid. It never mattered. Whether they left together or with other people, the next mission would see them back at their usual table for another night of revelry. The others were all disposable, but somehow, they weren't.

Thrrek kept waiting for things with Farkas to fall apart, because everything falls apart eventually. But five years and a million kisses later, he was still the one constant in her life. The world around them had spun completely out of control - they'd gone to war with both the Silver Hands and the Imperial army, dealt with the dragon problem and slain both their wolf spirits - but somehow, they managed to keep things simple. They just were, and that was enough.

Or so it had seemed, until the day that inevitability caught up with them at last, and seemed hell-bent on smacking them around.

It began, as so many of their stories did, at the Bannered Mare. She was idly chatting up the newest barmaid, Y'lara, while she waited for Farkas to turn up. Being a reasonably famous figure in Skyrim had some distinct disadvantages, and one of those was the excessive demand on her time. Meetings had run overly long in the Reach, one thing had led to another, and almost before she realized it she had been two weeks overdue in returning to Jorvaskr. Farkas had been off on a mission with Vilkas when she got in, but he was due back any time, and she'd left word for him to join her.

Sure enough, she soon felt familiar arms sliding around her and a smile spreading across her face. Y'lara looked distinctly taken aback, and she scuttled off quickly when Thrrek asked her for a couple of meads. Thrrek didn't care; the innocent ones were always so much fun.

She bent her neck back and looked at him, and was faintly surprised to see the intensity in his expression. She arched an eyebrow and inquired, "Miss me?"

His lips crashing down on hers was the only answer he seemed inclined to give, but she took that for an affirmative. She spun around so that she could kiss him properly, and he responded by hoisting her up onto the bar. Things grew fairly heated fairly quickly, and it wasn't until she heard indignant shouting that she regained any degree of situational awareness.

"Oy, you two! If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times - not on the bar! Never on the bar!"

She pulled back, laughing. "Sorry, Saadia!" Saadia grumbled in response, and Thrrek turned her attention back to Farkas. "Ready for that mead then?"

"Damn the mead." And with that, he threw her over his shoulder and carried her right out of the tavern.

Breezehome was one of the nicer houses in Whiterun, and possibly the best thing about being a Thane. The Harbinger's quarters at Jorvaskr were lavishly furnished, but she never felt she had any privacy there. The Companions had never been big on personal space, and had no qualms coming and going from her rooms at all hours of the day and night. This had led to some quite awkward moments. When Breezehome came up for sale, she'd purchased it sight unseen, with an alacrity that amused Farkas to no end. By that point, she'd have been quite willing to live in a hovel with a dirt floor, provided it also had a stout lock on the door.

Lydia had been the decidedly unwelcome surprise waiting for her when she unlocked the door for the first time. Tiresomely honorable and unaccountably judgemental as she was, it seemed she came with the territory. Despite Thrrek's repeated protestations that she neither required nor desired her services, Lydia continued to insist, with ever-dwindling patience, that as a housecarl she was sworn to Thrrek's service for life. Thrrek had finally given it up as a bad job, and over the years they had developed an uneasy truce; Thrrek stopped trying to find ways to rid herself of Lydia, and Lydia took to barricading herself in her room and pretending she didn't exist whenever Thrrek dropped in. It was the closest they would ever come to friendship.

The long walk and the bustle of homecoming seemed to have calmed Farkas a bit, and they settled themselves in chairs by the fire when they arrived. Almost immediately, she sprang back up again. "I forgot, I brought you a present from Riften."

"No, not right now. I want to talk to you."

"We've got all night for talking. This will just take a minute." She waved off further protests and ran for the chest in her bedroom. She came back waving the prize - a bottle of Special Reserve Black-Briar Mead - triumphantly over her head, but stopped short mid-wave in the doorway when she got a good look at his face. He was staring into the flames, and he looked . . . sort of unwell, and more uncomfortable than she'd ever seen him.

She nearly dropped the bottle in her haste. "Farkas! What is it? What's wrong? Are you hurt?" By the time she got to him, though, the expression had melted away, replaced by his habitual wry amusement.

"It's nothing, don't fuss." She raised her eyebrows in disbelief, and he hurriedly continued. "I'm just tired; I've been up for two days. Really. I'm fine." He cast about for a means to change the subject, and settled on her hand. "What's that you've got there, then, lass?"

"Mead," she said banally. He was clearly far from fine, but she knew better than to push. He would come to her when he was ready; he always did. She cleared her throat. "And not just any mead, but the good stuff. Special Reserve Black-Briar."

He chuckled softly. "Well, you know my weaknesses, I'll grant you that. Go on, then. Pour us a glass."

One glass inevitably turned to three, and then they were tumbling into bed without any further uneasy moments.

Hours later, when she woke to find him sitting upright on the edge of the bed staring at the floor, though, she couldn't stop herself. "You said you were just tired."

He shrugged. "I know. I can't sleep."

"Would it help to talk about it?"

"I really doubt it."

"Farkas. Look at me." But he wouldn't, so she had to resort to crawling across the bed and around him, hindered by the sheet that was tangling around her legs. She ignored it; it was cold, and this was important, and she didn't need her legs right now. She flipped over, and wiggled backward until her face was between him and his determined gaze at the floor. He closed his eyes. Thanking the Nine that she was flexible, she inched further backward until she could reach his face with her hand, got a death grip on the bedpost with her toes, and continued. "You can tell me. You can always tell me. That's what we _do_. Then we'll fix it, or kill it, and have a glass of mead to celebrate."

"This isn't . . . it's not anything like that, Thrrek."

"Like what?"

"Like anything!" His eyes snapped open, and she was surprised at the anger in them. "It's not like anything! And you can't fix it, or do anything about it, so can you please just drop it?"

"Drop what? Why can't you just . . ."

"Because I fucking love you!"

She lost her grip on the post then. Unfortunately, the sheet was still tangled around her legs. Partially caught under Farkas but largely tangled around her, it almost immediately gave up the fight, and both she and the now-ripped sheet went tumbling backward onto the floor. She sat up, rubbed her new bruise, and tried very hard to look as if she'd slipped because the wood was slick with sweat, and not because she'd had the shock of her life.

She failed, of course. This was evident by the expression on his face, which was torn between laughter and anger. And underneath all of that were the pain and accusation, which said more clearly than words that this was all her fault. That she had hurt him, and badly, and that this was not going to go away.

The sick, panicky feeling in her chest intensified when he sighed, and stood. "I'd better go."

"No! No, you can't! You can't just dump this on me and walk away, it doesn't work like that!"

"No? Then how does it work, exactly? What's your grand scheme for fixing this one?"

"Well I . . . we could . . . I don't, don't really have a plan, exactly, yet, but . . ." She floundered, unable to come up with a coherent sentence, let alone a master plan.

"There's nothing. Don't you see that?" He smiled, sadly. "You can't un-know things after you know them, and you can't un-say them once they're said. You told me that, once."

"You said . . . you said we were friends first, remember? That you didn't want to lose that." It was stupid, unreasonable, illogical to hold someone to something they'd said years before, but she was desperate, and she did so with a vengeance.

He knelt, and looked her in the eye. "I know. And we are. I just . . . I can't do this anymore." He kissed her then, fiercely but all-too-briefly, before he pulled away and smoothed back her hair. "Maybe . . . maybe I'll catch you at the Mare someday. Maybe we could have a drink and try to be . . . different. Or something."

When he left, she didn't protest. She didn't do anything. She just sat on the cold floor of her bedchamber letting the tears fall, still huddled in the torn sheet, trying to un-know the horrible truth now threatening to crush her.

Lydia, it turned out, had a knack for making pies. For the first week after she found Thrrek on the bedroom floor, she made one every day, and made her eat some. Other than that, she maintained both her distance and her silence. Thrrek didn't really remember her mother, but she imagined that this was more or less what it was like to have one. It was weird, but nice. And also delicious.

The next week she was forced to dramatically reevaluate her assessment, because it turned out that those pies had strings attached to them.

"The way I see it, it's time for you to stop behaving like a petulant child."

She glared more darkly at her, and shoveled another fork-load into her mouth. Petulantly.

"So he finally told you how he feels. So what? That's actually a good thing. Most people are stingy about their emotions, you know. You're lucky."

It had been a bad mistake to tell her what they'd fought about. She had even known it at the time. But she'd been so insistent, and there had been chocolate-pecan pie, her very favorite, and everything had gotten a bit confused.

She swallowed. "But he's not supposed to feel anything. That's the point. We agreed."

"What, you expect me to believe you don't feel anything for him? Then why do you care that it's over, hm?"

Thrrek opened her mouth to argue that she didn't, but she suspected that denying this all-too-evident fact was probably a losing battle. To cover her confusion, she took another bite.

"It's obvious that you love him back . . ."

At this, Thrrek felt she simply had to correct Lydia's terribly inaccurate assessment. But she was also choking on her pie, and what started life as "Well, yes, of course, but only as a friend!" came out as an incomprehensible "Nghaah!," accompanied by a spray of crumbs.

Lydia was unfazed. She simply poured another cup of tea, wiped the crumbs from her cheek, and continued as though Thrrek's interjection was in English. "Okay, but how is it any different, really? You care about him? Want to take care of him, protect him, make sure he's happy?"

Thrrek resigned herself to mutely sipping tea and nodding.

"Well. Anyone in Whiterun could confirm your, ah, more physical feelings for him. The pair of you have made _that_ clear for years. As for other people, you've sampled half the population of Tamriel by now. Anyone you'd rather be with than him?"

To be quite truthful, it had been months since she'd wanted to do more than idly flirt with anyone else. It just . . . they didn't matter was all. Disposable, the lot of them. But Thrrek had a horror of being quite truthful, so she settled for looking shifty and refusing to meet Lydia's eyes.

"So . . . how is that not love?"

And Thrrek really thought about the question. She considered rules and expectations and the hordes of failed relationships she'd seen that taught her never, never to trust anyone that much. She considered all this, and weighed it against Farkas. His smile, his laughter. His annoying habit of leaping before looking. His unsettling tendency toward brutal honesty, his adorable fear of spiders. And how she felt when she was with him. The way he just got her, laughed at her klutziness and histrionics, made her laugh at herself when the situation arose. Stopped her from overthinking and overanalyzing herself into the dark places in her mind, and got inside her labyrinthian defenses and refused to leave, until it felt like he just belonged there. How, with Farkas, everything was just . . . right. Safe. Simple.

She'd made a bad, bad mistake. She groaned, shoved her plate forward for more pie, and buried her head in her hands.

He'd clearly been up all night drinking. His eyes were bloodshot, he winced at even the slightest noises, and there was no part of him that did not reek of sweat and spirits. When he saw her standing in the doorframe, he groaned and pulled the blanket back over his head.

Saadia shrugged. "Last night, he insisted he never wanted to see you again. Then he vomited on Y'lara, probably scarred the poor thing for life, and passed out on the floor."

"Thank you for taking care of him, Saadia. I'm sorry for all of the trouble. Please pass my apologies on to Y'lara."

"It's not the first time a man's drunk too deep here, nor will it be the last. But I swear, I'm about ready to wash my hands of you two." With that, she closed the door, leaving them alone.

Thrrek approached the pile of blankets hesitantly. "You still alive in there?"

"Aye, lass," came the somewhat muffled response.

"Well, budge over then."

He complied, and even conceded to take the blanket off his head, though he still winced at the light.

Unsurprisingly, she didn't know how to begin. "Er . . . it looks like you had . . . quite a night."

He frowned. "Did you wake me up to make idle chat?"

"No. No, of course not. I . . . I guess I wanted to talk to you about something."

He raised his eyebrows inquisitively, but she found she just couldn't continue. How did other people manage this so easily? Words, feelings, all that mushy crap . . . doing something, anything, was always so much easier.

So she did something.

"Hey!," he protested, grabbing her hands to stop her pulling her tunic off. "I said I can't, and I meant . . ."

"No, this isn't that. Just . . . just hear me out."

He frowned again, but nodded assent and pulled back his hands. When she pulled the tunic off again, he went so still he didn't even seem to be breathing, eyes fixed to her throat.

Hesitantly, he reached out and touched it. "Is that . . . an Amulet of Mara?"

She nodded, once.

He gulped. "So, this is . . ."

"My grand scheme, yes."

"I . . . I don't . . ."

"Well. You said you couldn't keep on the way we were going. And I can't . . . these last few weeks, they haven't been . . . good. I . . . damn it all, I _missed_ you. And, well, there was pie, and gooey feelings, and I hated it, but the result is that I . . . well, you know . . . I just, I don't do well without you! You belong in my life. You aren't . . . disposable. So. I just thought I would . . . check . . . to see if you're interested. I . . . I really am good with toast, and it turns out Lydia can make pies. So, if you were interested, we could . . . I would like to . . ." She sighed. She was so, so bad at this. "Shit. Do you want to or not?"

"Was that . . . I'm not even really sure . . . was that a marriage proposal?"

She shrugged, and looked down at her hands, cheeks burning.

He raised her chin up so that he could see her eyes. "Because I'm sort of hung-over, and there seemed to be an awful lot of food in that speech. And I want to be really clear about this. You're saying . . . what, that . . ."

"I'm trying to say that I love you. Idiot." She crossed her arms across her chest and glared at him.

Most of the time, when he smiled, it was muted. A sardonic half-smile with equal parts joy and self-deprecation. But occasionally, she could surprise out a smile that looked the way she imagined he had smiled as a little kid, before he and Vilkas had been taken by those necromancers. Like an extra sun had suddenly risen on his face.

This was one of these moments, and it was infectious. She was hard-pressed to maintain her glare, but she persevered.

"That was, without a doubt . . ." he grabbed her and pulled her into his lap . . . "the absolute _worst _marriage proposal I have ever heard. That includes one I once heard a drunk man give to a mountain troll. So that's actually saying something."

It was just too much work. She gave up on the frowning, uncrossed her arms, and slipped them around his neck. "Well, forgive me, but I don't generally go in for all that emotional crap. This is all a bit new to me. I'd like to see you try it."

"Fine." He pulled her closer and kissed her, roughly. "Marry me, wench."

_FIN_

13


End file.
